The assembly of large scale articles such as partition walls, furniture and transport containers by joining together smaller units, particularly panels, is well known in the art. Depending on the nature of the joint between adjacent units, articles of different strengths and function can be produced. For example, where a partition wall is to be formed, the individual units need to be retained in the desired orientation, but need not necessarily be required to be joined together in a robust fashion to withstand impacts.
Where, however the units are to form part of a container, and particularly where the article is an item of luggage, the joints usually need to be able to withstand a large amount of strain from the weight of the contents and be able to stand up to, for example, airport luggage handling techniques, which can often involve the luggage receiving a number of impacts.
In the art, it has been a standard approach when joining panels together to insert a panel into a moulded extrusion and secure the panel in place by a fastening method such as gluing, riveting or screwing through the outer face of the outer wall of the extrusion into the face of the panel. The screw bites into the panel and as the screw is tightened the panel is drawn into contact with the inner face of the extrusion's outer wall.
The above approach has a number of drawbacks. Firstly, the stress from tightening the screw is concentrated on the outer wall of the extrusion and panel skin. Where, for example, the panels form part of a piece of luggage or cladding on a building, then the sealing joint between the panel and extrusion will be less efficient and the exterior appearance of the joint will not be so pleasing. Also, if the panel width is narrower than the extrusion's channel width, then additional packing, adhesive bonds or the like may be required between the face of the panel and the extrusion's walls to maintain the spatial relationship between the panel and the extrusion's wall.
It is an object of the present invention to seek to alleviate the above problems.